


A Study in Copper

by MaedhrosCedar



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: (but not really), Angst, Brian Needs a Hug, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Death to the Mechs spoilers, Gen, Oh gosh so much angst (sorry)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:41:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23267131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaedhrosCedar/pseuds/MaedhrosCedar
Summary: Sometimes, Drumbot Brian will wonder about what it means to be alive or, more specifically, to exist.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 55
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	A Study in Copper

On some days, when he’s feeling more philosophical, Brian will wonder about what it means to be alive or, more specifically, to exist.

He feels like he exists, and he’s able to question his own existence, so he supposes that by that logic he must exist. He may not be able to feel the smooth curve of a glass against his hand but he can see it fall and hear as it shatters on the floor if he lets it slip from his grasp. 

On one planet the crew visits, they find a computer. A mind composed of wires and chips and one with almost unlimited power, save that to create other mind like itself. Even with all the knowledge it holds and all the lives it has ended, it can still only act within the bounds of its programming. Chained to the ancient intentions of its creator. A creator who, even with the literal bars that bind her, Brian finds himself envying. Even without any hope of escape from her own eternal hell she still has free will. She refused to give her creation full agency and she will refuse to do so until time itself forgets her. There exists in her no switch that can be flipped, no button that can be pressed that would simply change her most innermost beliefs.

Brian had at least been given a name. That was more than Frankenstein had given her creation. The same name as he’d had before, he thinks, though it’s sometimes hard to make out the exact memories. Replication of a mind is far from an exact science, especially when the original has been frozen and the replacement made by an immortal vampire with a proclivity for experimentation. He remembers more than Ivy, that’s for sure, and she seems confident in her philosophical existence, in her own way.

Except, it’s hard to ignore the rest of it, the metal skin he wears which entombs the still beating heart of the man who had last laid claim to it. Carmilla had done a good job at attempting to copy the face but it wasn’t quite good enough, and whenever he catches a glimpse in a mirror he finds himself expecting to see the natural redness of warm skin, with a nose a little higher and cheeks more curved and dimpled than those that had been made for him. Brian prefers to keep the mirrors in the parts of the ship he frequents covered.

He feels as if he has a stranger’s memories, memories of a life before that wasn’t his. It was so long ago now that he doesn’t even know if it would have felt like his life if he were still properly alive (millenia change a man after all), but at the end of the day that doesn’t diminish the gnawing voice deep within him that accuses him of stealing the life of the man to whom his heart had once belonged. A good man. A man who had helped others and who had been killed for doing so. A man who didn’t deserve to be immortalised and remembered through this mockery of a being, who would happily kill and help kill everyone around him just so long as he could claim it in the name of some higher moral purpose.

The morality core itself, of course, was another issue entirely. He hated how all his deepest-held convictions could simply be changed by the flick of a switch. He was powerless to stop the changes between the two codes of ethics that Carmilla had programmed him with, and each time that the switch was flipped against his will he felt his certainty that he existed, existed as a person, diminish. Jonny acted on instinct, following his whims wherever they wanted to take him but at least he was consistent in his inconsistency. Brian on the other hand simply looked at scenarios with the cold efficiency of a machine trying to work out the most logically ‘good’ action, no matter the cost.

While he was trapped in the sun around which Fort Galfridian had once orbited, he had a lot of time to think. Even though he had no nerves with which to feel the unending heat of the star, he still felt in the back of his mind the phantom memories of a pain that felt not dissimilar. The cold can burn just as painfully as heat and once a pain like that has been burn into your mind it rarely leaves. The last time he (or had it really been him?) had been alone in space like this he’d been dying, waiting for a release from life that was granted to the one who’d come before but not for him. He’d been created, a changeling who imitated the form of a man.

An old riddle he’d heard during his time in The City had lodged itself in his mind. If every brick of a building was replaced, every nail changed, at what point did it stop being the building it once was? Was there a moment where it finally lost all that had made it itself and instead became something new? Could you pinpoint the exact time when the original had been killed and replaced by an imposter? People didn’t have to worry about these things. Even though they were constantly changing, being born and growing old towards death, they still had a certainty, a faith in their existence that he did not. He wondered how the building would have felt. He burned in the sun and he wondered how it felt to be replaced piece by piece until there was nothing left.

He was rescued from the sun, of course, and continued to smile and laugh with the crew, but the nagging voice within him stayed, and never was silent for long.

It always took the crew of the Aurora years to notice anything, if they weren’t paying attention, and they rarely were. It had taken decades to realise that Brian wasn’t on the ship when he’d left to search for solitude in Fort Galfridian, and many decades more for Jonny to remember to rescue him.

The same was true the last time that Brian left the ship. He could feel the cold creeping inwards and beginning to encircle his heart in a way that it hadn’t since being enclosed in its metal tomb. He knew what it meant and he found that he felt no fear, no great sense of loss, just understanding. Almost peace. He didn’t know what would lie waiting for him on the other side but he was ready to finally face it.

He didn’t say anything to the crew; he knew they’d likely work it out eventually. The corridor he was walking down was dusty with disuse, avoided by the crew because of the memories it brought back of the last of their number who had walked down it and never returned. He stopped for a moment, considering something, before taking off his hat and placing it by the side of the airlock door along with his (other) spare set of drumsticks from his belt. The last remainders of two lives: one had never been his and another he’d been born into against his will. He wouldn’t be needing either any longer.

He stepped through the door into the airlock proper, and took one final breath (he had no need of air but had never found it in him to stop the action, as if by pretending to breathe he could pretend that he were still the kind of man who needed to). The door closed behind him, sealing perfectly. He supposed that Aurora would notice him leaving but doubted that she would tell anyone else. Ever since Nastya had left she’d become more withdrawn, and nowadays was almost indistinguishable from most other ships. He laid one hand on the inner wall of the airlock, as a final goodbye to his once-closest friend. The outer door opened and as the room violently depressurised he was flung out into the void once more, and finally claimed by the cold that had sought to catch up to him for so long.

**Author's Note:**

> Finally after years in fandom I got round to writing my first fic and it turns out it's just angst piled up on more angst.  
> I made myself sad at least three times by writing this and it's taught me that Drumbot Brian honestly just deserves hugs and I am so very sorry that I gave him this instead.


End file.
